Illinois man sues city after Twitter parody of mayor led to raid, arrests

A man who was arrested and had his home raided because of his involvement with a Twitter account that parodied the mayor of Peoria, Illinois has filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming he was a victim of official misconduct.

Official documents
obtained by local media outlets indicate that the Peoria police
department raided the home of Jonathan Daniel, who was one of the
people behind the fake Twitter account @Peoriamayor. The account
included messages about sex and drugs, among other things, but
never earned more than 50 followers.Daniel portrayed Peoria almost as a
midwestern version of Rob Ford, although Twitter quickly
suspended the account because it was not marked as a
parody.

Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis described the account as “absolute
filth” during an interview with CBS Chicago, but now finds himself among the
Peoria authorities named in a suit from Daniel and the American
Civil Liberties Union.

Daniel's arrest in April made national headlines and attracted
the attention of ACLU Illinois, which said the contents of tweets
are irrelevant - what matters is that they are protected by free
speech.

“It's not up to you or me to determine what content we do or
don't like,” said ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka. “The idea of
the account was to have this Twitter account say things that the
mayor would never say. That's the precise nature of parody, which
has always been protected in this country.

“We don't go after Saturday Night Live because they say
things about a president or a powerful public official,” he
went on. “We don't go after a newspaper that writes a parody,
or the Onion.”

Daniel was initially charged with impersonating a public official
(a charge that was later dropped) and his roommate was taken into
custody for being in possession of a small amount of marijuana.
The suit seeks financial damages for property that was seized in
the raid and for the missed work caused by hours of questioning
at the police station.

“The joke of the account was to have my fictional mayor
saying things that no one would possibly think that Mayor Jim
Ardis would say,” Daniel said in a statement released by the
ACLU. “If the mayor was concerned, all he had to do was tell
the public that this was not his account and not his words,
rather than involving the police.”

Along with the raid, two of Daniels' roommates were put in
handcuffs at their jobs before spending hours alone in an
interrogation room.

“They just asked me about the Twitter account, if I knew
anything about it,” 27-year-old Michelle Pratt told the
Peoria Journal Star. “They brought me in
like I was a criminal.”

The notion that Daniel was using Twitter to actually impersonate
the mayor failed to convince many, with ACLU spokesman Yohnka
telling CBS that Ardis “brought to bear the power of the
government to literally go on a manhunt for someone; not somebody
who was engaged in criminal activity, but somebody who was simply
using a smartphone to engage in parody.”

Ironically, the attention around the case has only inspired more
social media parodies of Ardis and his administration, earning
the mayor enough attention to have a Wikipedia page created in his name. The events have
essentially duplicated what is known in pop psychology as the
“Streisand Effect,” in which a public figure attempts
to suppress unflattering information only to have news of that
attempt backfire and make even more news than it initially would
have.